The young woman welcoming us on to the aeroplane has a flight attendant’s wide smile and seems normal enough. But then the lights go out, we are plunged into pitch-darkness and all certainties are smashed in Duncan Graham’s psychological thriller, a solo performance by Hannah Norris that offers shifting, skewed perspectives.
Is the woman being stalked by a man with ash-coloured eyes? Or is he a figment of her imagination? Is she in genuine danger, or deranged by her anxiety about a world that she perceives as a threat? Childhood memories trickle through her mind, intermingling with dreams or nightmares: a woman, maybe her mother, wielding scissors in the family home; an incident in which a fish is immolated. Is she talking to herself? Or us? Or maybe a therapist?
There is plenty of atmosphere here, layered on thick by the clever lighting, including frequent disorientating blackouts, and a sinister soundscape. The way the show curls back on itself like smoke from a pyre is clever, suggesting that the woman is caught in a cycle she can’t break. But the staging too often seems like a plaster designed to disguise the holes in a flatly written script that has little development, stays on much the same pitch for almost an hour, and sometimes mistakes nastiness for psychological insight. Norris just about holds the evening together, but we are still left in the dark.
- At the Vaults, London, until 31 July. Box office: 0844-545 8282.
